The Roman Church has special obligations towards
Latin . . .
and she must manifest them whenever the opportunity presents
itself.

CARDINAL
RATZINGER ON THE LITURGY

This is a
complete translation of the French text of a speech given by the then
Cardinal Ratzinger, whilst Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, given in Rome on October 24 1998.

Ten years after the
publication of the Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, what kind of
balance sheet of its successes and failures can we draw up? I think it
is above all an occasion to show our gratitude and to give thanks. The
diverse communities born thanks to this pontifical text have given to
the Church a great number of vocations to the priesthood and to
religious life. These men and women, filled with zeal and joy and
profoundly loyal to the Pope, are rendering their service to the Gospel
during this present historical epoch  our own. By means of them, many
of the faithful have been confirmed in the joy of being able to live the
liturgy and in their love of the Church, or perhaps through them they
have rediscovered both of these things. In many dioceses  and the
number is not that small!  they serve the Church in collaboration
with the bishops and in a fraternal relation with those faithful who
feel themselves at home in the renewed form of the new liturgy. All of
this causes us today to express our profound gratitude!

Nevertheless, it would not be very
realistic to pass over in silence some less pleasant facts. In many
places, there have been and still are difficulties. Why? Because many
bishops, priests and lay-people see this attachment to the old liturgy
as a divisive factor. They think the attachment does nothing but trouble
the ecclesial community. They see the attachment as evidence that the
Council is being accepted "only with certain reservations" and
suspect that it means the obedience due to the Churchs legitimate
pastors is less than it should be.

We must, therefore, pose the following
question: How can these difficulties be overcome? How can the necessary
trust be built up so that these communities which love the old liturgy
can be fully integrated into the life of the Church? But there is
another question underlying the first.. What is the profound reason for
this distrust or even this refusal to accept a continuation of the old
liturgical forms?
It is of course possible that in this area there are reasons which are
anterior to any theology and which have their origin in the individual
characters of people or in the conflict between different characters, or
even in other entirely exterior circumstances. But it is certain that
there are also deeper reasons which explain these problems. The two
reasons one most often hears are:

the lack of obedience to the
Council, which is said to have reformed the liturgical books; and

the disruption of Church unity,
which is said to follow necessarily if one allows the use of
different liturgical forms.

It is in theory relatively easy to
refute these two arguments. First, the Council did not itself reform the
liturgical books; it ordered their revision and, to that end, set forth
certain fundamental rules. Above all, the Council gave a definition of
what the liturgy is, and this definition gives a criterion which holds
for every liturgical celebration. If one wished to hold these essential
rules in disdain and if one wished to set to one side the normae
generales found in paragraphs 34-36 of the Constitution De Sacra
Liturgia  then yes, one would be violating the obedience due to the
Council!

It is therefore in
accordance with these criteria that one must judge liturgical
celebrations, whether they be according to the old books or according to
the new. It is good to recall in this regard what Cardinal Newman said
when he observed that the Church, in her entire history, never once
abolished or prohibited orthodox liturgical forms, something which would
be entirely foreign to the Spirit of the Church. An orthodox liturgy,
that is to say, a liturgy which expresses the true faith, is never a
compilation made according to the pragmatic criteria of various
ceremonies which one may put together in a positivist and arbitrary way
 today like this and tomorrow like that. The orthodox forms of a rite
are living realities, born out of a dialogue of love between the Church
and her Lord. They are the expressions of the life of the Church in
which are condensed the faith, the prayer and the very life of
generations, and in which are incarnated in a concrete form at once the
action of God and the response of man.

Such rites can die, if
the subject which bore them historically disappears, or if the subject
is inserted into another order of life. The authority of the Church can
define and limit the usage of rites in different historical
circumstances. But the Church never purely and simply prohibits them.

And so the Council did
ordain a reform of the liturgical books, but it did not forbid the
previous books. The criterion the Council expressed is at once more vast
and more strict: it invited everyone to make a self-critique! We will
return to this point.

Now for the second
argument, that the existence of the two rites can harm Church unity.
Here one must make a distinction between the theological and the
practical aspects of the question. On the theoretical and fundamental
side of the question, it must be stated that many forms of the Latin
rite have always existed, and that these rites declined only slowly as a
consequence of the unification of human living space in Europe. Up until
the Council there existed, alongside the Roman rite, the Ambrosian rite,
the Mozarabic rite of Toledo, the rite of Braga, the rite of the
Chartreux and of the Carmelites, and the best known of all: the rite of
the Dominicans. And perhaps there were still other rites with which I am
not familiar.

No one was ever
scandalised that the Dominicans, often present in our parishes, did not
celebrate Mass like our parish priests, but had their own rite. We had
no doubt that their rite was as Catholic as the Roman rite, and we were
proud of this richness in having many different traditions.

Moreover, this must be
said... the freedom that the new Ordo Missae allows to be
creative, has often gone too far; there is often a greater difference
between liturgies celebrated in different places according to the new
books, than there is between an old liturgy and a new liturgy when both
are celebrated as they ought to be, in accordance with the prescribed
liturgical texts.

An average Christian
without special liturgical training finds it hard to distinguish between
a Mass sung in Latin according to the old Missal and a Mass sung in
Latin according to the new Missal. In contrast, the difference between a
liturgy celebrated faithfully according to the Missal of Paul V1 and the
concrete vernacular forms and celebrations with all the possible
liberties and creativities  the difference can be enormous!

With these
considerations, we have already crossed the threshold between theory and
practice, where things are naturally more complicated, because they
involve relations between living persons.

It seems to me that the
aversions of which we have spoken are so great because the two forms of
celebration are thought to reflect two different spiritual attitudes,
two different ways of perceiving the Church and the whole of Christian
life. There are many reasons for this. The first is that the two
liturgical forms are judged on the basis of exterior elements and so the
following conclusion is reached: there are two fundamentally different
attitudes.

The average Christian
considers it essential that the re-formed liturgy be celebrated in the
vernacular and facing the people, that there be large areas for
creativity and that lay-people exercise active roles. On the other hand,
it is thought essential to the old liturgy that it be celebrated in the
Latin language, that the priest face the altar, that the ritual be
rigidly prescribed and that the faithful follow the Mass by praying in
private, without having an active role. In this way of viewing things,
certain outward phenomena are essential for a liturgy, not the liturgy
in and of itself. In this view, the faithful understand and express the
liturgy by means of concrete, visible forms and are spiritually
quickened by these very forms, and do not penetrate easily to the
profound levels of the liturgy.

But the oppositions we
have just enumerated do not come from either the spirit or the letter of
the conciliar texts.

The Constitution on the
Liturgy itself does not say a word about celebrating Mass facing the
altar or facing the people. And on the subject of language, it says
Latin ought to be preserved while giving greater space to the vernacular
"especially in the readings and directives, and in some of the
prayers and chants" (36, 2). As for the participation of
lay-people, the Council insists first in general that the liturgy
concerns the entire Body of Christ, Head and members, and that for this
reason, it belongs to the entire Body of the Church "and
consequently the liturgy is to be celebrated in community with the
active participation of the faithful," And the text specifies: In
the liturgical celebrations, each person, whether as a minister or as
one of the faithful, should perform his role by doing solely and totally
what the nature of things and liturgical norms require of him."
(28) "By way of promoting active participation, the people should
be encouraged to take part by means of acclamation, responses, psalmody,
antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures and bodily
attitudes. And the proper time all should observe a reverent
silence." (30)

These are the
directives of the Council: they can provide matter for reflection to
all. A number of modern liturgists, however, have unfortunately shown a
tendency to develop the ideas of the Council in only one direction. If
one does this, one ends up reversing the intentions of the Council.

The role of the priest
is reduced by some to one of pure functionality. The fact that the
entire Body of Christ is the subject of the liturgy is often deformed to
the point that the local community becomes the self-sufficient subject
of the liturgy distributes the different roles in it. There is also a
dangerous tendency to minimise the sacrificial character of the Mass to
cause mystery and the sacred to disappear, under the proclaimed
imperative of making the liturgy more easily understood. Finally, one
notes the tendency to fragment the liturgy and to emphasise only its
communal character by giving the assembly the power to decide the
celebration.

Happily, there is also
a certain distaste for the rationalism banality and the pragmatism of
certain liturgists, be they theoreticians or practitioners. One can see
evidence of a return to mystery, to adoration, to the sacred and to the
cosmic and eschatological character of the liturgy, as is witnessed by
the "Oxford Declaration on Liturgy" of 1996.

Moreover, it must be
admitted that the celebration of the old liturgy had slipped too much
into the domain of the individual and the private, and that the
communion between priests and faithful was insufficient. I have a great
respect for our ancestors, who recited during low Masses the
"Prayers During the Mass" contained in their book of prayers.
But certainly one cannot regard that as the ideal for the liturgical
celebration! Perhaps these reduced forms of celebration are the profound
reason why the disappearance of the old liturgical books had no
importance whatsoever in many countries and caused no sorrow. People had
never been in contact with the liturgy itself.

On the other hand, in
those places where the liturgical Movement had created a certain love
for the liturgy  in those places where this movement anticipated the
essential ideas of the Council, as for example the praying participation
of all in the liturgical action  in those places there was greater
suffering in the face of a liturgical reform undertaken in too much
haste and limiting itself often to the exterior aspect. Where the
liturgical Movement never existed, the reform did not at first pose any
problem, The problems arose only in a sporadic way in those places where
a wild creativity caused the disappearance of the sacred mystery.

This is why it is so
important that the essential criteria of the Constitution on the
Liturgy, which I cited above, be observed, even if one is celebrating
according to the old Missal!

When this liturgy truly
moves the faithful with its beauty and profundity, then it will be
loved, and then it will not be in irreconcilable opposition to the new
Liturgy  provided that these criteria are truly applied as the
Council wished. Different spiritual and theological accents will
continue, certainly to exist. But they will no longer be two opposing
ways of being a Christian, but rather two riches which belong to the
same Catholic faith.

When, several years
ago, someone proposed "a new liturgical movement" to ensure
that the two forms of liturgy did not diverge too much and to show their
inner convergence, several friends of the old liturgy expressed the fear
that this was nothing other than a stratagem or ruse to eliminate the
old liturgy entirely.

Such anxieties and
fears must cease! If in the two forms of celebration the unity of the
faith and the unicity of the mystery should appear clearly, that could
only be a reason to rejoice and thank the Good Lord. In the measure to
which all of us believers live and act according to these motivations,
we can also persuade the bishops that the presence of the old liturgy
does not trouble or harm the unity of their diocese, but is rather a
gift destined to build up the Body of Christ, of which we are all the
servants.

So, dear friends, I
would like to encourage you not to lose patience  to keep trusting
 and to find in the liturgy the force needed to give our witness to
the Lord for our time.